The application execution technique is a technique to cause a virtual machine to execute an application program described in an object-oriented language. This is realized through generation of a class object from a class structure described in an object-oriented language, and providing of the class object to a platform of the virtual machine. The class object is an instance of the class structure. Industrial products as applications of the technique include, for example, playback apparatuses that have a Bluray Disc-Read Only Memory (BD-ROM) playback function.
Such playback apparatuses are developed by various manufacturing enterprises (called manufacturers), and remodeled almost every year. Accordingly, the playback apparatuses have different microprocessor units (MPUs), memory sizes, bus band widths and hardware parts such as graphic accelerator, and the application processing speeds of the playback apparatuses vary widely due to the differences.
Since the apparatuses are different in performance from each other, it is necessary to change the processing load when the application programs run. For example, the number of images of animation for a graphical user interface (GUI) should be increased or decreased. Since a playback apparatus equipped with high-performance hardware is capable of loading and expanding graphics data for GUI at a high speed, the number of the animation images should be increased. On the other hand, for a playback apparatus equipped with low-performance hardware, the number of the animation images should be decreased. Through such an adjustment of the number of images, it is possible to maintain the speed of responses to user's operations at a certain level without being influenced by the hardware performance differences. To realize such an adjustment of the processing load, it is necessary for application programs to estimate the performance of the hardware as the subject of the execution. For this purpose, when started up, applications may firstly execute a benchmark test for estimating the performance.
Patent Document 1 discloses an example method for such changing of the processing load with use of a benchmark test.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-99430